From the main menu, I right-click certain applications to add them to the desktop (they become KDE widgets). Within the menu, the application icons appear normal, and some appear normal when the desktop widget is created.

In the above image, the application icons for Kate and Irfanview appear as they do in the menu. LibreOffice Calc and Writer have a mini icon over a strange "grid". The icon background looks like a square that has been subdivided into roughly a 3x3 grid. The bottom corners and top left corner are black, the top right corner is oriented diagonally and black, and the remaining sort of "plus sign" is white. The tiny application icon sits on top of this distraction.

It appears that there is something unique in Mint's KDE implementation that results in selected desktop icons being created in this odd way. Any ideas as to the cause or solution?

Last edited by Fixer1234 on Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The issue turned out to be an incompatibility between the Gnome icon theme and LibreOffice. This was not an issue in earlier versions of Mint. I replicated the problem in the current release of Manjaro KDE, as well (it also bundles the Gnome icon theme).

Since LibreOffice is a standard package included with Mint, it might make sense for Mint to leave out the Gnome icon theme. The other bundled icon themes do not have this problem.

The solution for users with this problem is to switch to an icon theme other than Gnome.